


The Soft Goodbye

by madsthenerdygirl



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, I'm Sorry, M/M, Multi, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 11:52:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14212563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsthenerdygirl/pseuds/madsthenerdygirl
Summary: There's a dream that will not sleep,A burning hope that will not dieSo I must go now with the wind,And leave you waiting on the tide.





	The Soft Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary come from "The Soft Goodbye" by Celtic Woman.

Lucy didn’t know what she would see when she came to visit him.

He had never told her what had happened between them, the first time that he met her. The last time that she saw him.

His first meeting. Her last. How bittersweet.

All she knew—all that he had told her—was the time that she’d come to him. The date, that is, and around what time of night, and where, how she’d found him.

It was dangerous, going back to a time where you existed, but if you weren’t going anywhere near where you were, if you were going to another part of the country entirely, surely that was bending the rules enough to get by.

She didn’t know what she would see, but she could guess.

He’d lost them just five days ago, after all.

It was the night after the funeral. One woman and one young girl, one tiny, baby girl, too young for such cruelty, laid to rest. Relatives came. People crying. All to warn one man: do not look into this any further.

If only they had known. In killing his wife and child, Garcia Flynn now had nothing to lose.

He was sitting by himself in the darkness of his house, staring into nothing. He’d been drinking, but he was still more sober than he would have liked to be. Lucy had seen him like that a few times before. He and Wyatt would get drunk together, sometimes, start out shooting the breeze and then slowly spiral down into spilling darker things, secrets they couldn’t otherwise share, whispering them into the darkness like this was the only way to get rid of them.

Sometimes, she hadn’t been there. She’d make herself scarce. Other times, she’d just sit there, watching, silent. There was a camaraderie to them that in those moments she didn’t share, just as there were times when she and Wyatt would do their dorky flirtations, or when she and Flynn would bingewatch awful horror movies. They all balanced one another out, had their own dynamics. They all gave one another something. It was how they worked.

One time, though, she remembered, Flynn and Wyatt had an awful fight. Wyatt had stormed out, going to drive and drive and drive until he cooled off steam, but Flynn had gotten spectacularly drunk. Normally when she’d seen him like that, there’d be a half-passed-out Wyatt with him, his face buried in Flynn’s neck, Flynn’s arm hooked around Wyatt’s shoulders. It had made him look empty to be sitting there all alone.

The look on Flynn’s face that night was how he looked now.

Wyatt had come home, eventually, contrite and ready to all but throw himself at Flynn’s feet the way he always was, his anger eventually turning into self-loathing. And Flynn had grabbed him and held on, easy as that, as if it all didn’t matter, it all was forgotten, muttering his own apologies into Wyatt’s ear.

But there was no return for Lorena and Iris. They wouldn’t come back home.

Lucy let herself in. She’d learned how to pick locks long ago.

Flynn stirred as she entered the room and her breath caught in her throat. She’d expected the anger and sadness in his eyes, the broken, beaten down slump of his shoulders.

But she’d forgotten how young he was.

Flynn, her Flynn, he had been so frail towards the end. It had made her want to cry, seeing this tall, strong man, a man who’d snarled his way through life, a man who flung himself in front of bullets for her and swung his fists like they were made of concrete, turned into a frail ghost of himself.

And now she was setting him on the path that would lead him to that. She was going to give him the means, and he would take them, and in doing so he would commit suicide.

A slow, painful suicide.

Flynn, not her Flynn, not yet, turned and looked up at her. _You age well_ , he’d told her when she’d first met him. She hoped that was true.

“Who’re you?” he asked, his tongue heavy in his mouth.

She gently pried the bottle from his fingers and set it aside. “You don’t need to fake drunk with me,” she told him. She always knew when Flynn was lying, even if it was before he was her Flynn.

He straightened up a little at that, his gaze becoming sharper. He eyed her up and down. “How did you get in here?”

“The front door.”

“Are you—”

“No. I’m not Rittenhouse.” She never was, and she never will be.

“That’s what a member of Rittenhouse would say.”

Lucy sighed. He was always a stubborn man. Both he and Wyatt. But she was stubborn herself.

She pulled the journal out of her purse. It was old, now, the pages filled with everything from notes to sketches to small flowers pressed in between the pages. Once it had been blank, and she had dreaded filling it even as she knew that she must.

Now it was her life.

“My name is Lucy,” she told him, kneeling down to put her hand on his knee and look up at him, stare him full in the face. “Dr. Lucy Preston. I’m here from the future.”

“The future.” Flynn snorted.

Lucy passed the journal—passed her entire life—into his hands. She wrapped his hands around it, pressed them gently. He must understand how precious it was. “This will explain everything. Someday, you and I—we’re going to be partners. We’re going to stop Rittenhouse together.”

“We are?” Flynn’s expression was complex—it always was—anger and disbelief and hope and sadness all warring on his face.

Lucy couldn’t help herself. She reached up, cupping his face, feeling the familiar curve of it, the warm skin against her palm.

Tears sprung into her eyes. She missed him. She missed him so much.

“Dr. Preston,” Flynn said, and she could see it, see how his grief recognized her grief, how the pain called out to pain.

She shook her head. “Lucy,” she said. “Always call me Lucy.”

“Lucy,” he said, like he was trying the name out on her tongue.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He caught her hand, pinned it in place where it touched his cheek. “Who are you? What are we to each other?”

“We were partners,” she said. That was all she said, for that was all he had told her when they had met. Whatever else he would find in the journal—the photograph of the three of them taped to the inside back cover—that would be for him to discover on his own.

It was a lovely photograph. Jiya had taken it, after Rufus had given her that camera for her birthday. It was back when they were all still healthy, before…

Before.

They’d been out on a rare day off, having a picnic of all things because it was Jiya’s birthday and Jiya insisted. Flynn was lying on his back, and, miracle of miracles, Wyatt was touching him around other people, curled up into Flynn’s side, his head on Flynn’s shoulder and Flynn’s arm curled around his waist.

Lucy had been lying across both of them, on her back, her hair spilling out because she’d originally had it up but Flynn had undone it so he could play with it. His hand was in her hair in the photograph. One of her own hands was tangled up with Wyatt’s. Her other was reaching up into the grass, holding on. She remembered being afraid of floating away.

The smiles on their faces in that moment. “Look at you!” Jiya had said, teasing. “Could it be that you’re all smiling at the same time? We gotta record this for posterity.”

She blinked, pulling herself back into the present. She had to go.

She stood up. “Don’t look for me,” she told him. “You’ll find me. I’ll come to you, when the time is right.”

“You know what I’m going to do, then,” Flynn asked. “What I’m… planning.”

“The address for Mason Industries is in there,” she said. “If you can go back in time, stop Rittenhouse from existing, then you can save them.”

It was a lie. A painful, painful lie. But without that lie, nothing else would be set in motion.

“You’ll know what to do,” she said. “Just… follow your heart.”

He stood up as well. “Who are you, how do you know me—why do you cry, why are you crying for me—”

She pulled away. God, how she wanted to stay. “Just follow the journal, it’s all in there, I promise.”

He stared at her, confused, uncomprehending.

She couldn’t resist. She had to. “Don’t tell me this,” she said. “When you next see me. I won’t understand. But don’t—don’t ever forget, I love you. We both do.”

She was out the door before he could even think to follow her.

 

* * *

 

The monitor beeped steadily, as it always did, as she entered the room. She didn’t look at the empty space where another bed had been. That space had been empty for a month now.

Wyatt stirred as she came to sit down beside his bed. His body looked ravaged, shriveled, pale, a parody of the strapping strength it had once been.

“You should have known!” she had screamed at Mason when they’d gotten the news. Wyatt had to hold her back. “You should have warned us! You should have known!”

By then Flynn was in constant pain, unable to stand on his own. He’d traveled the most out of all of them so it made sense.

Rufus and Wyatt collapsed on the same day.

“It happens with astronauts who’ve been in space too long,” Mason said. “We’ve not just been in space, you’re traveling through it, through time—it’s not surprising that it would take its toll.”

If it wasn’t surprising, then why hadn’t he researched it? Why hadn’t he prepared for this?

Jiya was last, a few months after the men, and that was when they started asking—why not Lucy? What happened to Lucy?

She was fine, her body hale and hearty. No chronic pain. No arthritis. She was aging, but like a person normally would.

It was her family, Mason had concluded. Both sides of her family, those tainted Rittenhouse genes, had traveled through time before she was born. It must have given her something, just enough, to withstand whatever they’d gone through.

Mason had run tests, all kinds of tests, trying to see what was in her blood that could possibly, just maybe, save the others.

He wasn’t fast enough.

“Luce,” Wyatt croaked, bringing her back to the present. It felt like she was always time traveling nowadays, in her head. “Didja… find him?”

Lucy nodded. She took Wyatt’s pale hands in hers. “I got him the journal. He’ll figure out the rest.”

Wyatt’s eyes slipped closed again. He slept a lot of the time now, although he hated that—hated how his body was betraying him. “Good.”

She kissed his knuckles, held his hand, tried not to think about Rufus and Jiya in the next room over. Tried not to think about the empty space where Flynn’s bed had been.

They had paid so dearly over the years, paid in family and friends, paid in time and blood and tears, and now, there was one more price to pay for stopping Rittenhouse. Years after they’d destroyed that society, and they were still paying. When was it enough? Was it ever going to be enough?

“I think he knew,” she said softly.

“Knew what?” Wyatt murmured.

She thought of the desperate way that Flynn had grabbed her when they’d met at the Hindenburg. The strange, manic look in his eyes.

“I think he knew that was goodbye,” she whispered.

Wyatt managed to squeeze her hand.

Lucy squeezed back, and squeezed back, and squeezed back.

**Author's Note:**

> I was just thinking about the whole "being in space too long" thing and this popped into my head and I'm so, so sorry.


End file.
